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That was useful information. Or it would be once I got back to Richmond and had time to figure out how to make catnip brownies for Raj. I felt my lips quirk at the thought.

Know anything that works on badgers?

Sorry, Doc sent back.You’re on your own there.

About twenty minutes later my phone buzzed again. This time it was a text message from Ward telling me that he’d called in a report to the Shawano PD and given it to a Detective Van Buren. I never had gotten the case file from Smith, so I wasn’t sure if they were partners or if there was some other reason Ward had been forwarded to a different detective than the one I’d talked to, but it made me suspicious.

I supposed it was possible that Van Buren and Smith were partners, but in a department as small as Shawano, it seemed to me like most detectives were going to be working mostly on their own—if Richmond couldn’t keep us in pairs, then Shawano sure as shit shouldn’t have been able to.

Did it seem like this Van Buren was going to investigate?I texted back.

Hard to tell, came the reply. Which probably meant ‘no.’

Was it a long conversation?I asked.

Not really,was Ward’s answer.He took the details, but didn’t really ask any follow-ups.

That wasn’t promising. I was trying to figure out how to reply in a way that showed I was grateful he’d called, but that I was also frustrated that it wasn’t going to go anywhere when another message came in.

I tried.

I know. And thanks.

I blew out a frustrated breath. Federal law said the states could decide whether or not they were going to accept medium testimony as probable cause. It was in Virginia. It wasn’t in Wisconsin, as I knew damn well from my time on the force in Milwaukee. In Virginia, police could act on a tip from a medium, but they weren’t legally obligated to do so, and they couldn’t treat it as evidence in a trial, even if it provided probable cause for a warrant. Some places, you could do it with two or three independent medium reports. In some states, though—and Wisconsin was one of these—a medium’s testimony alone couldn’t be considered probable cause unless it was corroborated by some other evidence, although circumstantial counted.

But because the ME had ruled Gregory Crane’s death a suicide, we didn’t have any fucking evidence here that was going to be used to corroborate Ward’s tip. If this Van Buren person had even actually documented the tip to begin with, which I gave about a fifty-fifty chance.

Fuck.

I got why the law was what it was. Not everybody had the benefit of working with Ward Campion, who had literally never once been wrong about a dead person in all the time I’d worked with him. Some mediums had a harder time talking to the dead people and got mixed messages. Some of them were actually past seers and saw murders, but things were jumbled. Some of them couldn’t actually get the person they were trying to get, rendering them fairly useless. And some of them were opportunistic liars, because mediums are people, and there is a subset of people who are shithead wastes of space.

Point being, medium testimony isn’t always reliable, so the law was fuzzy about when and whether you could count a medium’s word as either probable cause or evidence.

The other part about it that was going to drive me up the wall was the fact that even if theydiddecide to do something with Ward’s tip, nobody was likely to tellmeabout it, because as far as they were concerned, I was just some asshole PI.

If we were lucky, they might start looking more into it, and Elliot might get a phone call sometime over the next few days. If we weren’t, Ward’s call would get either trashed or—maybe—added to the Crane file and just dumped in the archives. If wereallyweren’t, then they’d do some digging and find out I worked for the medium who called in the tip, andImight get a phone call about interfering in a police investigation.

Part of me kinda hoped for that last one, because I really wanted to let somebody have it. Especially because I knew I was right. It was also, unfortunately, a possible way to land my lily white ass in jail, and I didn’t really want to do that.

I was still glaring at my computer—answering some of the less urgent emails—when Elliot finally shuffled into the kitchen and poured himself a mug of coffee.

I looked over the top of my laptop at him. “Hey.”

He still looked like hell. I wasn’t going to tell him that, of course.

“I think—” He paused, pulled in a long breath, then sighed. “I think I should start going through stuff.”

I shut my laptop. “Stuff?”

“Clothes. Supplies. That stuff.”

“You sure?” I had no idea what the timeline on death and grieving and whatever was, but I knew some people kept their loved ones’ shit for years.

Elliot nodded. “Dad’s…waspractical. He wouldn’t want me to keep things that other people could be using.”

He wasn’t wrong. Gregory Crane always wanted to help people—to be useful. And he probably would want us to make sure his stuff went to people who could use it sooner rather than later.

“Okay,” I agreed.